Plato, Time, and Education: Essays in Honor of Robert S. Brumbaugh

283 Pages·1988·0.768 MB·English

by  Brumbaugh, Robert Sherrick;Hendley, Brian P.;Plato

Plato, Time and Education
Essays in Honor of Robert S. Brumbaugh
edited by
Brian P. Hendley
State University of New York Press
Page iv
Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
©1987 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission
except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
For information, address State University of New York
Press, State University Plaza, Albany, N.Y., 12246
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Plato, time, and education: essays in honor of Robert S. Brumbaugh /
edited by Brian P. Hendley.
p. cm.
"Bibliography of the writings of Robert S. Brumbaugh": p. 317
ISBN 0-88706-733-6. ISBN 0-88706-734-4 (pbk.)
1. Plato. 2. Time. 3. Education—Philosophy. 4. Philosophy-
History 5. Brumbaugh, Robert Sherrick, 1918-. I. Brumbaugh,
Robert Sherrick, 1918-. II. Hendley, Brian Patrick, 1939-
B395.P52 1987
100—dc19 87-21161
CIP
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Page v
To my parents, Bruce and Wynn Hendley
Page vii
CONTENTS
Preface xi
Acknowledgements xiii
Contributors xv
Part I: Plato 1
Chapter 1 Socratic Piety 3
W. Thomas Schmid
Chapter 2 Meno 86C-89A: A Mathematical Image of 25
Philosophic Inquiry
Kenneth Seeskin
Chapter 3 Plato on Doubling the Cube: Politicus 266 43
AB
Malcolm Brown
Chapter 4 The Theory of Perception in Plato's 61
Theaetetus
Robert Anderson
Chapter 5 Knowledge, Speculation, and Myth in 83
Plato's Accounts of the Order and the Distances of
Celestial Bodies
Alexander P.D. Mourelatos
Page viii
Chapter 6 What did Thales want to be when he grew- 107
up? or, Re-appraising the roles of engineering and
technology on the origin of early greek
philosophy/science
Robert Hahn
Chapter 7 Tonal Isomorphism in Plato and the I Ching: 131
Brumbaugh as cultural anthropologist
Ernest G. McClain
Part II: Time 153
Chapter 8 Time, History, and Eschatology 155
George Allan
Chapter 9 Time, Free Will, and Brumbaugh in Kantian 179
Epistemology
Manley Thompson
Chapter 10 Saint Augustine and Cicero's Dilemma 195
Brian Hendley
Part III: Education 205
Chapter 11 Education as a Theme of Philosophy 207
Nathan Rotenstreich
Chapter 12 Philosophy by Centuries: A Direction in 219
Teaching
George Kimball Plochmann
Chapter 13 Whitehead: Teacher of Teachers 229
Nathaniel Lawrence
Part IV: History of Philosophy 245
Page ix
Chapter 14 Mapping Friendship 247
Philip Bashor
Chapter 15 Albertus Magnus as Commentator on 261
Aristotle's Physics
Helen S. Lang
Chapter 16 Descartes in Meditation and Method 271
Berel Lang
Chapter 17 Kierkegaard and the Necessity of Forgery 297
Josiah Thompson
Part V: Bibliography of the Writings of Robert S. 317
Brumbaugh
Page x
Robert S. Brumbaugh
Page xi
PREFACE
Robert S. Brumbaugh was born on December 2, 1918 in Oregon, Illinois. He married Ada Steele in 1940
and they have three children. After his education at the University of Chicago and service in the United
States Army, Brumbaugh taught philosophy at various places, most notably at Yale where he has been a
Professor of Philosophy since 1961. His interests include travel and archaeology, the New York Mets,
and correspondence with students and colleagues. An illness in 1946 left him with a paralyzed left side
and the assurance by his doctors that he would never have any gainful employment. He is retiring at the
end of 1987 after 41 years of teaching; "employment," he notes, "if only modestly gainful".
This volume is a collection of original essays by former students and colleagues that is meant to pay
tribute to the man and his work by exploring topics that have interested him through a long and
productive career. The essays are grouped under general headings: Plato, Time, Education, and the
History of Philosophy. Seventeen authors are included from the United States, Canada and Israel. Their
approaches are different; but each is well grounded in the history of Philosophy and attempts to deal with
issues in new and insightful ways that seek to stimulate further philosophical thinking in the spirit of
Brumbaugh himself.
The volume is unified by our common desire to do honor to the man who through his scholarship,
teaching, and ongoing friendship epitomizes for us what Whitehead called the imaginative scholar, that
rare individual who combines the disciplined rigor of scholarly research with the romantic excitement of
intellectual adventure. We have been privileged, each in our own way, to have been partners with
Brumbaugh in some of his intellectual adventures. The book concludes with a bibliography of
Brumbaugh's writings from 1947 to the present, listing some 15 books and well over a hundred articles.
BRIAN HENDLEY
WATERLOO, CANADA
Page xiii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Robert Neville, Rulon Wells, and the late Nathaniel Lawrence, who were among
the earliest supporters of this project. The contributors to the book were uniformly enthusiastic about
participating and willingly acceded to my strict deadlines. Other former students and colleagues of Bob
Brumbaugh were also strongly supportive and made a number of helpful suggestions. Mrs. Nathaniel
Lawrence kindly granted permission to publish her husband's essay. My colleagues, Larry Haworth and
Joe Novak, were of great assistance in answering questions of style and scholarship, as was David
Binkley of the Arts Library. My wife Margaret made time in her own busy schedule as a professional
librarian to take on the arduous task of proof-reading.
Bill Eastman of SUNY Press liked the idea of a Brumbaugh Festschrift and backed my efforts from the
start. The University of Waterloo provided much needed financial support from the Social Sciences and
Humanities General Research Grant. This enabled me to hire Brian and Virginia MacOwan who had the
technical expertise to input the manuscript on the computer, assist me with the copy-editing, and produce
the camera-ready copy. I appreciated their patience and hard work, as well as the advice of Bruce Uttley
of the Department of Computing Services and the help with the various figures from Graphic Services.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge the co-operation of Bob Brumbaugh himself. His own work has
been the model and the stimulus for the essays in this book. Having known Bob for nearly twenty-five
years, I can attest to the fact that teaching need not be incompatible with friendship. It is in the spirit of
friendship that we present him with this collection of original essays in his honor.
Page xv
CONTRIBUTORS
GEORGE ALLAN is Professor of Philosophy and Dean of Dickinson College (Carlisle, Pennsylvania).
He has published articles on philosophical and educational topics and is author of Importances of the
Past: A Meditation on the Authority of Tradition (1986).
ROBERT ANDERSON is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Washington College in Chestertown,
Maryland. His doctoral dissertation was a co-winner of the Jacob Cooper Prize for Greek Philosophy at
Yale. He is completing a book on Plato's Theaetetus.
PHILIP BASHOR is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arkansas and an organizing trustee of
the Association for Process Philosophy of Education. His research has been in the areas of social
philosophy and philosophy of religion.
MALCOLM BROWN has taught humanities, classics, and philosophy at various liberal arts colleges,
most recently at Brooklyn College where he will retire as Professor of Philosophy in 1987. Author of a
number of articles on Plato and his mathematical interests, he is also the builder of a hydroelectric
powerplant at Jeffersonville, New York.
ROBERT HAHN is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.
He has published several articles on Plato and Aristotle and is the author of a forthcoming book, Kant's
Newtonian Revolution in Philosophy. Winner of the Mary Kady Teu Prize in Philosophy, Hahn's
dissertation won the Jacob Cooper Prize for Greek Philosophy at Yale.
BRIAN HENDLEY is Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo
(Ontario). He has written articles on medieval philosophy and the philosophy of education and is the
author of Dewey, Russell, Whitehead: Philosophers as Educators (1986).
Page xvi
BEREL LANG is Professor of Philosophy and Humanistic Studies and Director of the Center for the
Humanities at the State University of New York at Albany. His books include Art and Inquiry (1975),
Philosophy and the Art of Writing (1983), and Faces, and Other Ironies (1983).
HELEN LANG is an Associate of Philosophy at Trinity College (Hartford). She has published a number
of articles on both Greek and medieval philosophy and has lectured both in the United States and abroad.
NATHANIEL LAWRENCE died in Williamstown, Massachusetts in March, 1986, where he had taught
Philosophy at Williams College since 1960. Author of Whitehead's Philosophical Development (1956),
Alfred North Whitehead (1974), and (with R. Brumbaugh) Philosophers on Education (1963) and
Philosophical Themes in Modern Education (1973), he was also an accomplished naturalist, a gifted and
imaginative traveller, and a great teacher.
ERNEST McCLAIN is Emeritus Professor of Music at Brooklyn College of the City University of New
York. His books include The Myth of Invariance (1976), The Pythagorean Plato (1978), and Meditations
Through the Quran (1981).
ALEXANDER MOURELATOS has taught at the University of Texas at Austin since 1965, where he
organized and continues to direct the Joint Classics-Philosophy Graduate Program in Ancient
Philosophy. His publications have been on topics of pre-Socratic philosophy, Plato's astronomy,
Aristotle's natural philosophy, and linguistics.
GEORGE KIMBALL PLOCHMANN was Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University until
1982 and is editor of the Philosophical Explorations Series for Southern Illinois University Press. His
most recent book is A Friendly Companion to Plato's Gorgias (in press).
Page xvii
NATHAN ROTENSTREICH is Emeritus Ahad Ha'am Professor of Philosophy at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem and Vice President of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He is the
author of many works on philosophy and the history of ideas in Hebrew, German, and English.
W. THOMAS SCHMID is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North
Carolina at Wilmington. Author of several articles on Plato, his doctoral dissertation shared the Jacob
Cooper Prize for Greek Philosophy at Yale.
KENNETH SEESKIN is Associate Professor and Chairman of Philosophy at Northwestern University.
He has recently published a book, Dialogue and Discovery: A Study in the Socratic Method, and is
editing a series in Jewish Philosophy for SUNY Press.
JOSIAH THOMPSON is author and editor of several books on Kierkegaard. In 1978 he resigned as
Professor of Philosophy at Haverford College (Pennsylvania) to pursue work as a private detective in
San Francisco. He is also the author of Six Seconds in Dallas (1967) and Gumshoe (forthcoming, 1988).
MANLEY THOMPSON is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. His
publications have been in the areas of metaphysics and epistemology, including a book on the
philosophy of C.S. Peirce. His most recent work has been on the theoretical philosophy of Kant.
Page 1
PART I: PLATO
Page 3
1 Socratic Piety
W. Thomas Schmid
I
The traditional ancient Greek conception of piety (eusebeia ) was a virtue involving proper care or
1
attention to the Gods, in the form of both proper worship and the proper attitude. The pious man, like
the priest of Apollo Chryses or the loyal swineherd Eumaios, performed the ritual acts of purification,
libation, sacrifice and first fruit for the God's helpful favor (charis ) in response to his own petitionary
2
prayers (see Iliad 1.33-52; Odyssey 14.418-455). The inner essence of such piety was the feeling of
3
religious awe, of God-fearing reverence (sebas ). More fully articulated, this attitude involved the
religious consciousness counseled by Delphi: to ''know thyself" (gnothi sauton ), i.e. to recognize one's
mortality and weakness compared to the Immortals and one's place in a larger order. The opposite
attitude was carelessness of the Gods (asebeia ) and foolish arrogance (hybris ), which eventually would
4
be punished.
Piety was perhaps the most basic ancient Greek social virtue, insofar as religion was the basic means of
social integration and solidarity, the "glue" which seemed to preserve the continuity of communal life
5
(see Euthyphro 14B). The center of the household (oikos ) was the hearth, and participation in the
6
family cult shaped all essential family affairs. Religion also played a constitutive role in the public life
of the city-state (polis ), as the state took institutional control over religious life during the reorganization
7
of Greek society in the 7th-5th centuries B.C. The city's religious festivals ordered its time no less than
the city's temples defined its space. In the practice of the oath taken before the Gods, religion, morality
8
and the contractual life of society seemed indissoluably linked. And as the city was a sacrificial
community, watched over by its own protective deities, piety was naturally regarded as a civic duty. If
Socrates or anyone else was thought to subvert the worship of Athena or any of the other Gods, he was
9
also thought to subvert the state.
Page 4
II
By the end of the 5th century B.C., however, the foundations of the traditional religion had been shaken
in Athens, partly as a result of the impact of the two other main traditions in ancient Greek religious
thought — the Greek enlightment, on the one hand, and the mystic and ascetic movements associated
10
with Eleusis, Dionysis, Orpheus and Pythagoras, on the other. Both the enlightment and the mystic
traditions had their own views about the true nature and value of piety.